It’s a Small Town After All

RARELY has a town been conceived and constructed in the glare of publicity and aura of hope that greeted Disney’s master-planned, picture-perfect village of Celebration in central Florida. Expectations were so high that, in November 1995, 4,000 people entered into a lottery for the chance to win the right to pay 25 percent over the market price to move into one of the first 500 or so homes.

Many of those pioneers expected Celebration to recreate the ideal of Disney World just a few miles away, not for a weeklong holiday, but for 52 weeks of the year. They thought their children would get straight A’s at the model school and that there would never be a weed in their lawns. For the solidly middle-class, overwhelmingly white population, this was the adventure of a lifetime, the chance to start over in a town paved with great expectations.

Reality seemed to catch up with the utopian village, which Disney gave up control of a few years ago, when residents awoke on Monday morning to find that one of their neighbors, a 58-year-old retired schoolteacher, had been murdered. The yellow crime-scene tape surrounding his condo contrasted with the nearby town square, which was decorated for Christmas and awash in holiday music from speakers hidden in the foliage. Then, on Thursday, another resident fatally shot himself after a standoff with sheriff’s deputies. The apparently unrelated deaths showed the world what people in Celebration already knew: life behind the town’s white picket fences wasn’t perfect after all.

We moved to Celebration with our two children in 1997. We were among the first residents, though we arrived with our eyes wide open and a contract to write a book about living in Disney’s brave new town. We found out just how strange a place we had chosen when a new neighbor told us that he and his family had considered going to Mexico for vacation, but found they had just as much fun at the Mexico pavilion at Epcot Center at Disney World. Another neighbor — a security guard at Disney — kept a six-foot-high Mickey Mouse in his front window, which our children found a little creepy. But there was a spirit of camaraderie that everyone embraced, even we skeptics.

Photo

Credit
Ryan Dodgson

The town felt like a movie set. Architects like Michael Graves and Philip Johnson designed its public buildings. Rocking chairs lined the man-made lake in the center of town; they weren’t tied down and they were never stolen. Houses were variations on a limited number of designs, based on the architecture and feel of old coastal villages. They were clustered around parks, with porches hugging the sidewalks to encourage neighborliness. The community rulebook mandated the color of the houses and the varieties of plants in the pristine yards. Everything spoke softly of small-town America, family values and safety.

But long before the schoolteacher’s body was discovered on Monday, many people in Celebration had already realized that Disney’s social imagineering couldn’t create a bubble of immunity. By the time we moved away in 1999, the pixie dust had begun to fade for some of the diehard believers. There had been a spate of divorces, a couple of domestic abuse cases, a handful of stolen bikes and even an armed robbery.

The years have changed the footprint as well, and not for the better. Celebration’s initial design of a downtown core to emphasize walking over cars and friendliness over isolation started to disappear even before Disney ceded control. Ever-larger houses have spilled across hundreds of acres of reclaimed swamp, replacing the small-town feel with something closer to traditional suburban sprawl. The town now has about 10,000 residents.

There was another kind of blight, too. When we drove down our old street a few months ago to visit friends, two of the 16 houses stood empty, the paint peeling and the once-pristine lawns burned out in the scorching sun — a story repeated on almost every street in the town. The housing foreclosures that has swept across Florida hit Celebration hard. One real estate Web site recently listed 492 foreclosures in town, and housing prices have dropped sharply from the highs of the middle part of the last decade. The movie theater, once a focal point of downtown, shut its doors on Thanksgiving Day.

The wave of news coverage that accompanied the violence this week in Celebration says more about society’s enduring fascination with the unobtainable vision of utopia than it does about the town itself. Residents there long ago got over the idea that their home was another ride at the Magic Kingdom. They know that not everyone lives happily ever after, even in the town that Disney built.

Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins are the authors of “Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town” and the forthcoming “Fallout: The True Story of the C.I.A.’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 4, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s a Small Town After All. Today's Paper|Subscribe